Producing the Fear Culture in Media: An Examination on Coronavirus Discourse
Producing the Fear Culture in Media: An Examination on Coronavirus Discourse
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DOI：
10.7596/taksad.v9i2.2636
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发表时间：
2020-06-01
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Dunaievska, Olha, V
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Chaiuk, Tetyana A.;Dunaievska, Olha, V
恐惧文化已经成为西方社会看待生活的一个中心视角，在过去的几十年里，脆弱和不安全感增加了。关于恐惧文化的社会学研究为理解媒体对冠状病毒爆发的报道如何有助于培养受众的焦虑提供了理论背景。本文的目的是研究如何在英国报纸上报道COVID-19疫情，以及在英国登记第一例致命病例之前，即2020年1月1日至3月5日，使用了什么语言手段来培育危险的预期。为了确定报纸所使用的语言手段来呈现冠状病毒作为最终的威胁，从而在读者中培养恐惧文化，批评性话语分析（CDA）被选为研究的主要方法，因为它研究了媒体文本中如何使用语言手段来对受众产生预期的效果。该研究显示，该时期报纸的社论、标题和文章通过戏剧化地报道中国的疫情，将冠状病毒比喻为接近英国并最终像海啸一样袭击该国的致命生物，反复强调大流行的全球性和政府遏制疾病的措施不足，从散布恐慌的角度来框定冠状病毒大流行。
Fear culture has become a central perspective of viewing life in Western societies where the feeling of vulnerability and insecurity has increased over the past few decades. Sociological studies on the culture of fear provide the theoretical background for understanding how the media coverage of the coronavirus outbreak helps to cultivate the audience's anxiety. The purpose of this article is to examine how the COVID-19 outbreak was presented in British newspapers and what language means were used to breed the anticipation of danger even before the first lethal case was registered in the UK, that is from January 1 to March 5, 2020. To identify the verbal means employed by newspapers to present the coronavirus as the ultimate threat and thus to cultivate a fear culture among their readers, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is chosen as the main method of the research, since it looks into how language means are used in media texts to produce an intended effect on audiences. The study reveals that the newspapers' editorials, headings, and articles of that period framed the coronavirus pandemic in terms of fear-mongering by dramatizing reports on the epidemic in China, by metaphorically presenting the coronavirus as deadly living thing approaching Great Britain and finally hitting the country like a tsunami, by repeatedly emphasizing the globality of the pandemic and inadequacy of the government's measure to curb the disease.